Thomas Edison, in 1877, was still an unknown inventor focused on developing better hardware for telegraph operators. In particular he was trying to create something that would send voice messages over telegraph lines. In July he was recorded as saying
Batch (his assistant), if we had a point on this, we could make a record of some material which we could afterwards pull under the point, and it would give us the speech back.
By breakfast the following morning, they had succeeded in getting clear articulation from waxed paper, which was the first recording medium. However it wasn't until late November, 4 months later, that Edison and his staff had caught onto the commercial potential within entertainment.
The important points for us in this story is that (1) Edison was actively trying to solve a problem he wasn't sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike, (2) he had a clear understanding of the problem and the customer and (3) even he didn't realise the potential of his invention straight away.
The simple answer is that good ideas come from problems, Thomas Edison was engaging with telegraph operators around their problem of not being able to send voice messages, from that we have the beginning of all recorded audio.
Tina Seelig, Executive Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program, speaks about the lesson that is the crux of entrepreneurship: All problems are opportunities, and the larger the problem, the larger the opportunity.
The world is full of problems and therefore opportunities which can be overwhelming so a good place to start is by understanding your personal focus which is made up of:
We are all good at something but it is very common for people not to realise what they are good at, the easiest way around this is to go out and ask the people that know you the best. This is also a great warm up activity for when you need to go talk to strangers about their problems. The reason why this is an important part of coming up with good ideas is that you need to be a useful part of solving this problem. There is no point coming up with an idea for someone else.
Entrepreneurship is full of learning, you will learn faster and more by doing entrepreneurship than anything else you can do in life. You will also need to learn all sorts of things along the way so if you come up with an idea that needs someone to do something then you will need to learn how to do it. So this step is about identifying the things that you are excited to learn.
Next it is about identifying opportunties for you to combine the things you are already good at with the things you are willing to learn in order to serve a customer/solve a problem.
It is important to note that your answers will change throughout the journey as you will learn more through the process but once you have a draft personal focus is it is time to think through where that intersects with business opportunities.
It is a “perceived means of generating economic value (i.e., profit) that previously has not been exploited and is not currently being exploited by others” (Baron, 2006, p. 107). That is, it has a newness factor and the potential of profit.
